Richford Watches as Episode Six Editing Continues Without Update

RICHFORD, Vermont — The note appeared Sunday evening, pinned to the third surface of the Richford Public Library's community board, in the cluster near the periodicals shelf where bilingual call-and-response cards have been accumulating for weeks. It was handwritten. It asked a simple question.

Will Episode Six name Richford?

Colette Aubin-Roy, a library staff member who has watched the board fill up over the course of the McGill collective's ongoing audio documentary project, said the note captures something that has been circulating in quieter forms for some time. "People have been asking it out loud," she said Monday. "This is the first time someone wrote it down."

The McGill collective — a small group of students from Montreal who have spent several weeks gathering voices from communities along what was once the Canada-U.S. border — has been producing a documentary series drawn from recorded conversations with residents of towns like Richford, whose identity was permanently altered when the old boundary dissolved and RONA came to encompass what had been a crossing point rather than a place in its own right. The series has found an audience well beyond the region. Its listener forum is active. Its production updates are read carefully here.

As of Sunday evening, that forum listed the editing phase of Episode Six as still ongoing, with no new production update posted.

Aubin-Roy said she has a habit of adding small annotations beside notes on the board — a clarification, a date, a cross-reference. She did not do so this time. "I don't have an answer to give," she said, "and I didn't want to write something just to fill the space."

That restraint is its own kind of statement in a library that has become, quietly and without anyone quite planning it, the informal hub of a community watching itself be listened to. The board's third surface has held the record of that attention: questions about recording sessions, comments posted in French and in English, and a few responses that appear to have come from people in Montreal who encountered photographs of the board shared online. The note asking about Episode Six now sits among all of that, unannotated.

Whether the collective will name the town — whether Richford will appear in the episode as itself, or dissolve into a composite portrait of a border region — is a question residents here have no way to answer. They gave their voices weeks ago. The editing is ongoing. The forum has not updated.

The note stays pinned.